Shall we have a bash, chaps?

Max Hastings reviews Secret War Heroes by Marcus Binney.

The conduct of conventional war demands discipline - rigorous planning, obedience to rules and deference to hierarchies. Many senior commanders warmly disapproved of the wartime Special Operations Executive, because it flew in the face of these precepts.

SOE, warmed by Churchill's sponsorship, gathered together an extraordinary range of individualists and exhibitionists, heroes and lunatics. It waged war against the enemy in a fashion that would cause heart failure at any staff college, but achieved some remarkable things as well as some extravagant nonsenses.

Marcus Binney successfully plundered a treasure trove of agents' personal files to write an earlier book about some of SOE's women agents. Now, he has trawled the archives once more, and come up with a collection of gems of little-known wartime derring-do, and their perpetrators.

There was Gus March-Phillips, a stuttering soldier who started the war inauspiciously, remarking to a comrade on the beach at Dunkirk: "I say, I f-feel a b-bloody coward - h-how about you?" The same comrade remarked that March-Phillips was "the first Army officer I've met so far who kneels down by the side of his bed for ten minutes before he goes to sleep".

Yet March-Phillips was also a man of violent passions and reckless courage, who created SOE's SSRF - "Small Scale Raiding Force". In January 1942 he launched Operation Postmaster, a picaresque "cutting-out expedition", which seized two Italian merchantmen from the neutral Spanish colonial port of Santa Isabel in West Africa, and towed them triumphantly to Lagos.

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Later that year, March-Phillips led several parties to reconnoitre the Channel Islands and French coasts, but on September 12 he overreached himself. With 10 others, he landed near St Honorine in Normandy, to attack a German post and seize prisoners before withdrawing. Binney writes: "It was a bold, even rash plan given the proximity of other houses and the likelihood of the alarm being raised." The night was so dark that the raiders could not identify the designated landing place. March-Phillips asked his team with characteristic insouciance: "What do you think, chaps? Shall we have a bash?" They had their "bash". But within minutes of landing, a guard dog alerted a German patrol, and after a firefight all the attackers were killed - including March-Phillips - or taken prisoner.

It was an absurdly reckless venture, which serves to highlight the dangers of following heroes into battle. The Germans, with the sort of wit the British pride themselves on, awarded the guard dog an Iron Cross, which it sported on its collar thereafter.

Among Binney's other portraits is that of Bill Sykes, a man with the saintly demeanour of a vicar, who taught silent killing to SOE's agents. A host of trainees charmed by Sykes's benevolent smile and gentle tones were disconcerted when he concluded a lesson with a snarl: "Then you bring up your right knee into his testicles."

Sykes was already almost 60 when war came. He had adopted his Dickensian handle by deed poll in 1917, evidently embarrassed by his original German family name, Schwabe. He became an unarmed combat expert and pistol shot with the Shanghai police between the wars. At a range of 100 yards, he could perform the extraordinary feat of hitting a target the size of a man's head four times out of five with a revolver. This colourful figure died of heart failure before the war's end, leaving behind only a couple of suitcases of personal possessions.

Georges Bégué was the first agent SOE dropped into France in 1941, a young Frenchman who had escaped through Dunkirk, where he was serving as a liaison officer with the British Army. After capture by the Germans, he was visited by a priest who lifted his cassock to reveal a radio transmitter, with which Bégué contacted London and arranged his own escape. He later became the French Section's Signals Officer, and lived to the age of 82.

George Binney, the author's stepfather, was a pre-war businessman who master-minded a vital SOE operation in 1941 to sail five merchant ships loaded with ball-bearings from neutral Sweden to Britain, for which he was knighted. The book describes Binney's Byzantine efforts to repeat this coup a year later. These were less successful, but created a diplomatic, political and naval saga detailed in Foreign Office files.

Percy Mayer ran a one-man SOE mission in Vichy-held Madagascar, to pave the way for the British landings in 1942. Harry Rée saved the French city of Montbeliard from RAF bombing by sabotaging the Peugeot works there with a combination of plastic explosive and blackmail of the management. After the war, Rée became a well-known British educationalist, his secret exploits quite unknown to most of the students he taught.

Denis Rake was a delightfully camp figure who in 1947 was eking a living as Douglas Fairbanks Jnr's butler. His employer was disconcerted to see a letter arrive at the house, addressed to "Major Denis Rake, MC". "Oh dear, I'd hoped you wouldn't know about all that nonsense," said the butler apologetically.

Rake, born in 1901, was the son of the Times correspondent in Brussels and a Belgian soprano. He spent his youth in a circus - and in Occupied Belgium in the First World War. His father was shot by the Germans for aiding Allied escapers. Rake himself spent some years as the gay lover of various exotic European mentors. He was working at Drury Lane with Ivor Novello when war came.

He became an SOE wireless operator, and served in France with immense courage on two missions, surviving capture by the Germans and escape across the Pyrenees. Slight of stature and defiantly gay even when living amid a band of maquis (resistance fighters) in the Auvergne, Rake was one of the most raffish and endearing of SOE's extraordinary gallery of stars.

I like to think myself quite familiar with SOE's wartime history, but Binney's book told me a host of new things about a host of remarkable people. He has done a fine job of culling hitherto unexplored files, to produce a splendid set of adventure stories for any devotee of the genre.